


of slaves and monsters

by skyqueenclarke



Series: children of desert, born to reach the sky [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-02
Updated: 2016-06-02
Packaged: 2018-07-11 17:06:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7061836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skyqueenclarke/pseuds/skyqueenclarke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>I can show you another way</i>, someone whispers from the darkness. </p><p>Ben Solo wonders about choices.</p>
            </blockquote>





	of slaves and monsters

There’s a boy.

He’s tall and proud and broken, and he calls upon a lightsaber and actually believes it will come to him.

(no, but before that, it used to be different)

There’s a boy and he hears whispers of power and strength-

(but that’s not really the start not really no)

There’s a girl.

She’s young, but she has a strong heart and rough hands. She feels a life on her stomach that shouldn’t be there and thinks _you cannot own me and you cannot own him._

The girl is stubborn and proud and beautiful and still believes, despite everything, in freedom and the possibility of, one day, walking the skies.

(that’s the start really, just that, a girl and a dream of freedom, not even for herself, but for a boy that she’d love above everything)

Many lives and worlds and deaths later, there’ll be a boy who won’t know her name, but will carry her legacy, who’ll hear whispers from the darkness and think _yes, I’m free as well, free to choose-_

(there’s no freedom for them, Kylo Ren will think, a lifetime later. No freedom for people whose destinies have already been chosen by something greater and more powerful than they can imagine)

 

 

His mother stays with the boy, sometimes, to watch him fall asleep, to care for his dreams, so full of darkness and fear.

The boy is named Ben, for a man who gave a lightsaber to a boy and changed the galaxy.

This Ben hasn’t changed the galaxy yet, but he will. For now, he’s just a child who dreams every night dreams that are not his, but flashes of wars, cities and chaos - a planet full of fire, a woman’s gasp as she holds her own neck, pilots surrounding a moon, a green lightsaber.

(sometimes it’s things that never happened – twin children smiling at each other, a mother’s gentle hand upon their faces as she smiles at her husband, all of them in Darkness, all of the in Light)

(somehow, those are the worst ones)

The boy hates sleeping and the way it doesn’t bring him peace – the Force holds on, tight, power spilling over in a way it isn’t supposed to. His mother puts her hand upon his face, loving and strong and angry as always, and doesn’t understand.

(there’s a shadow none of them see, hiding in the Dark where his mother doesn’t dare to look – it whispers to the boy, so soft, almost like a lullaby)

 _Maybe,_ Ben hears his mother say to his father defeated shoulders, _maybe Luke-_

Maybe it will help, it’s what she means.

(it won’t)

 

 

Ben doesn’t fit right in this world, he knows – he’s always been a little too strange, a little too quiet, a little too powerful. Always a second away from blowing up, it keeps people away – he’s not gentle or kind, with all of his mother’s harshness, all of his uncle’s stubbornness, all of his grandfather’s fear, a jigsaw of everything the galaxy feared about the Skywalkers.

(he’s nothing like his mother’s _favorite_ pilot in-training, Poe, who’s good and kind and charismatic. Sometimes, Ben thinks she wishes he were more like Poe. Sometimes, Ben wishes that too)

Ben was conceived not long after his grandfather’s death, he’ll realize one day. Maybe that doesn’t mean much, or maybe that’s why the Force decided _yes, this one, he’ll take everything Anakin can no longer carry-_

It doesn’t really matter why. The only thing that matters is what happens after.

 

 

Once, just once, Ben wonders if it would’ve been different if his mother had been the one to train him, if she had trained more herself, not so afraid of the ways she – and he – were like her father. Because Uncle Luke is Light and Kindness and Love, but he says _fighting is never the answer,_ and talks to Ben about things like peace, forgiveness, and empathy, and it feels like a foreign language.

Ben was different from his mother, of course, because she was Justice and Strength and Freedom, all things he didn’t know how to be, but still. He wondered, just once.

(Leia would wonder for the rest of her life)

 

 

Ben can’t figure it out if there’s a turning point, in which he just accepts and lets the darkness take over. It would be easier if there were, for him and even for Uncle Luke, a moment where they could look and say – _yes, here, that’s the choice that changed everything-_

(Ben often wondered if there was one choice that changed everything for Grandfather. That was before he stopped believing in the freedom to choose)

Reality is never that easy. Maybe he was doomed from the first time he woke up in tears, _so tired make it stop don’t want to control and try and hurt anymore just let me come home mama,_ maybe it was when he first heard _my name is Snoke and I can teach you-,_ or maybe it all changed the day Uncle Luke was talking about the Force, and the way everyone was part of it, the day the treacherous thought slipped into his mind.

_I don’t want to be like everyone else, want to be specialstrong **chosen.**_

Snoke offers him a new destiny in a silver plate, the first person to tell him of The Chosen One, of the power of his blood, of the legacy he could follow. Snoke tells him that Darth Vader was everything Anakin Skywalker couldn’t be and that he changed the galaxy. Snoke tells him he can do the same.

(and, well, his parents did name him Ben for that, didn’t they?)

 

 

Later, his parents and Luke and even Rey would tell themselves that Snoke lied. That the whispers and the darkness reached into Ben’s mind and filled it with things that didn’t exist - but this is what he learns from his master:

_The Jedis were weak, full of pride and confusion, and gave your grandfather as many rules as he had when he was a slave._

_Your mother is afraid of her own power and afraid of what you could do with yours._

_Your uncle is still stuck in the past, still making excuses for weak man that manipulated him his entire life._

_Your father cannot reach the Force so he cannot understand._

The Force hums at Snoke’s words. No lies.

Just a different point of view.

 

 

In a way, though, it truly starts the day Rey disappears.

(it will begin to end when she comes back, but that’s another story)

Rey won’t remember this, and by the time Kylo Ren meets her again, neither will he – but there was a time she could always make him smile, that sweet little girl with eyes so much like his mother’s.

He’s never had siblings, or wanted to have them, not really – he always felt a sibling would just be another person better suited for his life than he was.

But Rey is a nice surprise. She’s a happy baby, hardly ever fuses, and she _adores_ him. Luke’s other students play with her, sometimes, but she always prefers to sit on his lap, hanging tightly to his shirt. Rey’s mother looks at him strangely and he gets the feeling she wants to take Rey from him, but he doesn’t mind.

He likes making rocks flow near her, because it always makes her laugh.

She’s small and fragile – strong in the Force, of course, maybe stronger than him. And sometimes he’s angry about it, sometimes he wants to scream _I am the true heir._

But most of the time-

Well, she barely reaches his knee.

 _You understand, don’t you?,_ he asks her, though she’s too young to answer him properly. Rey doesn’t dream like he does, but she hangs too tight to them sometimes, and, when she cries, her room shakes, just a little. The Force already has its claws on her, already holding her too tight, giving her knowledge she shouldn’t have and power she’s not ready for.

He’ll wonder, later – more than just once – if things would’ve been different if Rey had been older, a peer to share his doubts and fears, and not so young and innocent to her surroundings yet. If she had been older, her mother couldn’t have just taken the girl and maybe-

Both Ben and Kylo Ren wonder too much about things that will never change.

Because Rey is a little girl, and her mother does take her away, and Luke follows blindly, trying to find them, and Ben is left behind, already so full of waiting and already dreaming of another legacy, without bright eyes or soft smiles to remind him why he shouldn’t. Ben is supposed to wait for his mother to get him while Luke searches for his daughter, but the second his uncle’s ship disappears, he knows he won’t.

He remembers too much of the bad to want to go back - his parents, always arguing, his father, always leaving, his mother, always working.

(god, he misses them – he hasn’t seen his father in _so long_ )

Ben wants to be special. He wants to powerful, to prove he doesn’t need a pacifist teacher, or a mother’s touch, or the people whispering of a strange boy, who will never be like his parents.

 _I need to do this, Uncle_ , he thinks and hopes his uncle won’t hear, _because you’ve lied to me._

 _I need to this, Mother_ , he also thinks, _to become more powerful, and prove to everyone I’ve always been strong and special._

( _I need to do this, Father_ , he doesn’t say, _because Snoke commands it_ )

 

 

He looks for Rey. Snoke had ordered him to find her, the most special of all the students.

(to turn her? To kill her? Ben doesn’t dare ask)

It takes awhile, but he has a connection with Rey - the Dark side is powerful and strong, and it reaches far into the galaxy in a way his Uncle’s Light can’t.

Rey’s mother is there, and he doesn’t hesitate, not for a second.

(it’s the first time he ever kills. It won’t be the last)

When he reaches Rey, she’s a little bigger than he remembered. She’s scared, but not of him, which is always a novelty.

The second he looks at her, he knows he can’t take her. Darkness is power, but it’s also destruction and an endless void and he feels himself breaking, even if he reaches for it.

For Rey, there could be something else.

(also, secretly, in a deep part of his soul – what if she’s _better at this than him_?)

It will be better, he tells himself, if she’s hidden away, from all of this. He chose another legacy, for himself, and maybe Rey will be happier if she can find another one altogether, one in which her blood won’t define her, one without the memories of them to make her want to leave and search and find them.

So he tells her with his _heartsoulpower_ that they’ll come back for her and she believes it, because she doesn’t know how to tell if he’s lying yet. He tells himself he may even come back for her, when he’s stronger.

(he won’t, he knows. And before they reach Snoke, he pulls his memories from his own mind and hides her away with his own doubts and fears)

(to Snoke, he’ll say _I couldn’t find her,_ and it won’t be a lie – she’ll remain hidden in the endless desert, like the ones before her, until the Force decides she doesn’t get to choose either)

 

 

Almost two decades after his mother first whispers _maybe Luke,_ the boy sees his father again, and the man is so much older and tired and small than he remembers. He’s not Ben anymore, not really, because Ben was a weak boy who cried because he didn’t want to sleep and dream and wake up and never rest. Kylo Ren is something else, made of death and fire, someone who hasn’t been hugged in almost twenty years and who’s killed more people than his parents would dare guess. He sees who he wants to be and won’t stop until he gets there.

So Kylo Ren kills Han Solo, because he must and because Snoke commands him and because he truly believes it will make him stronger, to purge himself of the person that ruined his Skywalker destiny with his Force-less blood.

Han Solo dies with his hand on Kylo’s face – the man who was his father looks sad. He looks like he forgives him. Kylo doesn’t care.

(Ben wants to tear his hair from his face and jump from that bridge himself)

 

 

(Kylo Ren doesn’t think too much on how he became Kylo Ren. He knows he built himself on losses and pain and death - he had a bond with his mother until he snapped it, he had knights like him, and he killed for them until he killed them, and he had Uncle Luke’s students until he killed them too.

He had Snoke whispers until they become words, cold hands until he built a broken lightsaber that’s always too hot, and he had his dreams until he stopped dreaming at all.

He supposes it doesn’t matter how it happened exactly. Kylo Ren is not something he meant to become, not really, more like something that found itself to him as Ben was consumed and broken and destroyed, but-

Kylo Ren has a purpose and maybe he is afraid, but not of himself. Even the monstrous thing that is Kylo Ren is an improvement from Ben, as far as he’s concerned)

 

 

He doesn’t recognize Rey when she comes back, of course, not really. Even when he looks into her mind, and sees all the loneliness, he still doesn’t realize.

She’s familiar, the Force whispers. The Force hasn’t spoken to him like that in a long time.

It doesn’t come to him until later, when he’s pulling at his own memory and power, trying to erase Han Solo and his sad eyes from his mind, trying to erase the memory of Chewie ( _Chewie,_ who had carried him to bed whenever he was around) shooting him and hurting him. There, buried deep, it’s the knowledge.

He knows that girl.

From a half forgotten dream, from a life that belongs to someone else, she was special and wonderful and small and good.

 _No,_ he thinks. _She can’t do this._

She had fought back – turned his power around and made her way into his mind.

He doesn’t think of bright eyes anymore – she’s no one, just a little girl who came to steal what’s his by right.

(she’s in control and that’s the worst part. He always thought she’d be like him, torn apart, a moment away from bursting. But she’s calm, connected, maybe even _in peace_ – she calls for _his grandfather’s_ lightsaber, and it goes straight to her, and once again, he’s an unfit, undeserving heir to his own legacy)

 

 

He tries talking to Grandfather about it, but he won’t answer anymore. He used to speak to Kylo, sometimes, about darkness and power and rules, a quiet, broken whisper.

But he never showed himself.

(had he not cut his mother off, she would’ve said into his mind, _how are you so sure it was him talking to you?_ )

(but his mother can’t reach him anymore)

 

 

(insanely, without reason, he suddenly wishes he could speak with his father)

 

 

A long time after that, he’s fighting again – Luke and his mother are there, and he sees them from the distance, a quick look. They’re both so much taller, in his memories.

(it’s one thing to know that his mother thinks her beloved son has chosen a wrong path – it’s another altogether to feel it pulsing, the _love fear sadness regret,_ but mostly _disappointed I have failed why couldn’t he be different?_ )

Rey is there too, stronger and ready to fight. He never had trouble fighting other Force sensitive people before, but apparently Rey really is a Skywalker, because she fights like him, with anger and heart and everything she is.

They’re weak, bloodied and tired, but he won’t stop and neither will she, he knows, because neither of them knows how to stop, even if it’s pointless, even if he knows Snoke would gladly discard him if he could have Rey.

She’s a fighter, he’ll give her that.

(she’s _so young._ He had almost forgotten, how young she is, how bright and full of life – how much like he used to be, maybe, once, a long time ago -, and of all the people he hurt, it’s ironic and sad that her lonely life is the thing that stays with him)

(Han Solo may have disappointed her, as a father, but she’d have been a daughter he’d be proud to have and Kylo hates her for it, a little)

He’s not sure they wouldn’t have fought to the death, but the Force had already decided that, whichever way this was going to end, it wasn’t time yet.

(it’s not done playing with them, not done devouring them and turning them into pieces of a game it has been playing with itself for longer than they can imagine)

Before Rey leaves, she invades his mind and tells him to not let Snoke make a slave out of him. He burns with anger and wants to tell her she doesn’t understand a thing, but she’s gone before he can.

 _I am free,_ he wants to tell her. _And I chose this-_

(and which one is worse? The idea that he couldn’t choose, that Snoke entered his mind and his dreams and his soul until there was no other choice – or the idea that Snoke had no power, that he couldn’t bring out something that wasn’t already there and that the little boy named Ben actually chose to make himself into Death and Anger and Darkness?)

(which one is worse? To be a slave or a monster?)

 

 

He dreams that night, for the first time in a long time.

His mother is there, old and unstoppable, leading the rebels. Luke is strong, fighting Hux and Phasma.

(his father is dead, of course)

Rey is there. He’s fighting Snoke with her. They defeat him, twin strikes to each side – one red, one blue.

They watch Snoke fall – he turns to Rey, to see her bright eyes, something like a smile on his scarred unmasked face. But she’s not smiling - she turns her lightsaber to him, a perfect strike, right on his stomach.

He falls to the earth, knowing no one will mourn him.

 

 

The dreams don’t stop, after that.

In some of them, his mother kills him. Sometimes she cries, sometimes she doesn’t.

(in the ones she cries, Han Solo shows himself, even without any power or knowledge of the Force, so he can cry with her)

In one dream, Luke kills him – with no anger, just resignation.

In another, he kills himself.

In all of them, he burns.

 

 

(in a dream that’s not quite a dream a woman comes, with kind eyes and flowers in her hair. She kisses him on the forehead, and she looks like an angel. She tells him it’s not too late)

 

 

 

 

 

There’s a boy.

And, by the Force, he’s still just a boy, even covered in blood, darkness and death. The boy doesn’t believe in choices, not anymore, but apparently Rey does, and it hurts to see her choose the life he couldn’t live. She’s bright and good and kind, and she’ll kill him without any remorse or hesitation.

(like he killed her mother, he imagines)

He offered to be her teacher, and he was wrong, he was _so wrong,_ there’s nothing he could possibly teach this girl.

(he could let her kill him. It would be easy and fast, because Rey is not cruel, and he could rest, finally, close his eyes and accept it, like Han Solo did, and maybe his mother would even be relieved)

(maybe Snoke would turn Rey, or maybe she’d kill his master, but, either way, this story doesn’t need him anymore)

But there’s a girl who sits with him, and he turns his head, wanting to ignore her, because he wants to speak to Grandfather, but Darth Vader was a shadow and Anakin Skywalker can’t reach him.

The girl doesn’t care for his wishes. She takes his face in her hands, eyes so much like his mother’s – and Rey’s -, and tells him _be brave,_ which makes him laugh and cry, so she laughs and cries with him. _Do you still believe in freedom?,_ he asks, because he doesn’t know her name, but he recognizes her eyes and smile and sadness.

 _Of course,_ she says, this girl who was made of deserts and blood and skies, and passed it on to each and every one of them. _They put us in chains again and again, but only because we break free each time._

He can’t be good, he wants to tell her – he doesn’t know how, he’s not sure he even wants to be good. Ben is dead because he killed him.

She shakes her head, doesn’t let him say anything and speaks again. It echoes – three generations worth of echoes -, like nothing he’s ever heard before, _be brave, and don't look back._

Ben is truly dead, he knows. But Kylo Ren will die too, he thinks or knows or hopes. He can’t be different, not really, not good, not ever the son his mother wishes for, but-

But.

Maybe there’s still a choice left in him after all.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm a firm believer in Rey Skywalker and you cannot convince me otherwise. 
> 
> Follow me on tumblr! reyskywalkker.tumblr.com


End file.
